"People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose."
Match Point
Criatividade: um recurso ou um fardo / O que vem com o pacote
"Observemos um inquérito recentemente feito a várias dezenas de professores primários por psicólogos do Skidmore College. Quando inquiridos sobre se queriam ter crianças criativas na sala de aula, todos os professores responderam afirmativamente. Mas quando foi pedido a esses mesmos professores que classificassem os alunos em diversas escalas de personalidade, os traços mais directamente associados ao pensamento criativo (como 'exprimir-se livremente') eram também os mais associados aos alunos 'menos preferidos'. As crianças que sonham acordadas e improvisam podiam ser imaginativas, mas era difícil ensiná-las e obtinham piores resultados nos testes normalizados. Em consequência disso, eram regularmente rejeitados e desincentivados. Os investigadores resumiram os seus tristes dados: 'Os juízos feitos para a escolha do aluno preferido estavam negativamente correlacionados com a criatividade; os juízos feitos para a escolha do aluno menos preferido estavam positivamente correlacionados com a criatividade."
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine
A Rough History of Disbelief
 |
| Jonathan Miller |
"Infact, intelligence, which was once seen as the antecedent cause of all things, is, in itself, almost certainly, a biological phenomenon. Far from being the initiator of things, we are now beginning to recognize that intelligence is a relatively late arrival in the universe. Like the limbs and organs which, until Darwin, were visualized as the products of the intelligent design, it's becoming increasingly likely that intelligence itself is the product of natural selection. Inconceivable without the existence of the brain. Even the idea of the soul, which the faithful fondly visualize as the colonial outpost of an imperial power on high, will, I'm sure, shortly be explained as the autonomous product of local brainwork."
Jonathan Miller, aqui
Imaginação por metro quadrado
 |
| Sillicon Valley |
Em que medida a proximidade física afeta a qualidade da investigação científica?
Isaac Kohane
"De facto, os melhores estudos eram constantemente produzidos por cientistas que trabalhavam a uma distância de dez metros uns dos outros, ao passo que os piores trabalhos provinham habitualmente de colaboradores situados a mais de um quilómetro." [...] 'Se queremos que as pessoas trabalhem juntas de forma eficiente, estes dados reforçam a necessidade de criar arquitecturas e instalações que sustentem interações físicas frequentes', afirma Kohane. Por outras palavras, as nossas ideias novas mais importantes não chegam através de um ecrã. Pelo contrário, surgem de conversas triviais, de demasiados cientistas a partilhar o mesmo espaço."
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine
E mais ainda, aqui.
Interaction
"As ideias mais criativas, segundo parece, não surgem quando estamos sozinhos. Pelo contrário, elas nascem dos nossos círculos sociais, de conjuntos de conhecimentos que inspiram pensamentos novos. Por vezes as pessoas mais importantes da nossa vida são pessoas que mal conhecemos."
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine
still on fairytales
 |
| aqui |
"Fairytales move like dreams from image to image, rather than rationally from event to event. And, like dreams, they resist explanation. A fairytale is resistant to any single simplified meaning. The multi-layered quality of a fairytale is something that many scolars acknowledge in theory, but deny in practice. Especially when they deal with oral fairytales."
Neil Philip, in Creativity and Tradition in The Fairytale
"A new mythology. We must be able to dream. We must try to find a new magic. That is what an 'oral' [versus literary] tale means to me. It is what, by subtracting meaning, leads us to dream about what is missing. We do not dream anymore when we watch these Walt Disney Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella."
Armando Maggi
‘We must be able to dream’
"We cannot live without mythology, it’s the way we reason, the
way we survive, the way we make sense of our world. It’s just that the
stories we’ve been using—mythic stories, fairy tales, legends—they’re
not working anymore. We need something new. What we long for is a
remythologization of reality.”
Armando Maggi, aqui
Comendo animais
No espaço de uma vida, um europeu médio terá comido:
7 ovelhas, 24 coelhos, 43 perús, 789 peixes, 1/3 de um cavalo, 5 vacas, 42 porcos e 900 frangos.
O que dá um total de 1800 animais.
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that at least
one of the following propositions is true:
(1) the human species is very
likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman
civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations
of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost
certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that
there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who
run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Há vida depois da morte?
"It will happen to all of us that at some point you will get tapped on
the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over but, slightly
worse, the party is going on but you have to leave. And it's going on
without you. That's the reflection that most upsets people about their
demise.
All right then, because it might make us feel better,
let's pretend the opposite. Instead, you will get tapped on the shoulder
and told, great news! This party is going on forever and you can't
leave. You've got to stay. The boss says so and he also insists that you
have a good time."
Christopher Hitchens
Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?
Diz Simon Blackburn:
I also agree that our values can be tempered by science. I think, for example, that the further understanding, for example, of the similarities between the male brain and the female brain march alongside other cultural causes to assist in the equality of women and I hope it very much does so. I think that measurements of identity of intelligence, identity of skill, identity of other cognitive functions will be scientific measurements. They could also insist in breaking down racial barriers and in breaking down gender barriers. So, of course, science can inform our values and should inform our values, and I think we all put our hands up to that.
As to whether you need nothing but science, which I think was the first message we heard, I think I'm afraid I don't agree with Sam (Harris) about that. And neither do the other three speakers we've heard so far. And the reason, I think it's an important reason, it's philosophical, I'll just spend a couple of minutes saying why I think it so.
Virtually all philosophies of mind recognize two different kinds of mental state. There are mental states whose business is to reflect the world as it is, to represent the world to, in other words, inform you about the environment in which you are to act. Those go by the name of beliefs. For if a belief is sufficiently certain and sufficiently well tested you might call it knowledge. So there are beliefs about the world, knowledge about the world, and their business is to reflect the world as it is.
But then there are mental states like desires or intentions, or concerns. Now they have a slightly different, the usual metaphor that philosophers use is 'direction of fit'. They're the things that you care about. And their function is to motivate you to get the world to conform to the content of the desire. If you desire to go to the fridge and get a beer, your business is to, you're set, you're poised, you're disposed to change the world so that first of all you will become nearer to the fridge than you were and secondly that you get a beer. That's changing the world. And the function of the desire is to change the world to conform to whatever is the content of the desire.
Now, many, many moral philosophers, myself included, put values on the 'desire' side of those mental states. The job of values is to orientate you towards the world, to orientate the way you behave, to, as it were, to reflect what you care about, what you desire. It's not just what you desire, it's what you're concerned about in much more important ways. A value is like a desire that you are prepared to make public, that you want coordination on, that you're prepared to insist upon from other people. At it's limit it will define things that you think you must do, not just things you want to do and things that other people must do in relationship to you. So, those are values.
So it's going to be inevitable that there's a gap between fact and value because your two mental states, the ones that represent the way of the world and the ones that motivate you to act in the world as you understand it to be, have this different function.
So, it's one thing to know the world and what the world is like, and it's another thing to care about it in any particular way.
Now Sam [Harris] said that you could just chuck away all the writings of moral philosophers because science had discovered that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering. Well, I don't know which science discovered that. It was certainly a major theme of Aristotle, it was a major theme of the Buddha, it's a major theme of Christianity, it's a major theme of any moral philosopher that's ever lived.
Where the moral philosophers find the going difficulty is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing, so let me give you a couple of examples. Some people think that flourishing is just a matter of contented, happy kind of dreamlike mental states. A bit like after you take a spliff or two or you got that beer out of the fridge. This was the target of, for example, 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley. He created, he wrote about a world of, sort of, zombies. Happy zombies kept in a kind of dreamlike contented state by a combination of drugs and lies. Another way you can be happy, you can flourish, is by living in a fool's paradise. By turning your face away from the things that might make you unhappy or just be an ignorant of them. So you can take two people in identical apparent mental states. Each of them believes they're living the American dream but one of them is in a complete illusion. He believes that his wife loves him and that his children love him and that the job is going well and that his colleagues respect him, and none of that is true. He's living in a fool's paradise, and according to Aristotle and many moral philosophers following him, that man is not flourishing because he is living under an illusion. However happy he may say he is, however happy he might appear to be by some neurological measure, since it's not a life of achievement and of real truth and attainment to a way of being in the actual world, he's living in a fool's paradise.
Again, other people have had conceptions of flourishing which included suppressing desires rather than satisfying them. The Buddha did this. Stoicism does this. The idea is that you can easily become a kind of utility gobbler, a utility monster. You want to gobble up experiences, you want to gobble up goods. You want to buy bigger houses, you want to satisfy more and more desires, and that that isn't a flourishing way of life, even if you managed to satisfy them. The real life consists in self mastery and wisdom and understanding that a desire satisfaction doesn't necessarily bring the most flourishing kind of life.
Now all those are moral ideas which throw around the conception of well-being and problematize it. Sam [Harris] thinks we can do without all that. That you can go to a scientist and say, was Buddha right about flourishing? I don't think you can. I think you have to work out for yourself what you care about in your life and the way you care to live it. And, actually, the same comes when it is a question of the utility of others. Peter [Singer] talks about the expanding circles of reason by itself. Means that you, as it were expand from being concerned just for yourself and for your family, to be concerned for more and more and more sentient things until, eventually, you become a servant of the world. Giving away all your money to other people and so forth.
I don't think reason tells you such thing. I think it's an excellent thing if you expand your sentiments and I very much hope, as it were, that we all do become more charitable. But I don't think that you are under any obligation to become a servant of the world. And one of the hardest things in ethics is to decide in how to prioritize your own well-being the well-being of your family, the well-being of those to whom you owe debts of gratitude, your loyalty to particular groups amongst whom you live, versus a more impersonal duty to those who lie outside that immediate circle. I think prioritizing one over the other is a very hard decision many of us have to make. All of us have to make. Every time you take your children on holiday, you could be saving three children in Africa, their death or their eyesight or whatever. And yet people do go on taking their children on holiday. And I'm glad they do. I think that they have to.
So, prioritizing these things is very hard, it's very difficult, it's not solved just by saying, oh it would be awful if everybody was be miserable and it would be wonderful if everyone was happy. You can't live simply with that as a guide. It's no guide at all. So I'm afraid ethics is and remains a very difficult subject, and it's a complete illusion to suppose that science will give us all the answers.
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W H Auden
Eu também quero acreditar
"I believe that we can recover the lost connection between Athens and
Jerusalem. We could get back a world where philosophy was valued. Where
the beauty of science was considered worth studying, worth revering
even. Where literature would be the key to the study of ethics and
morality. And if you wanted the transcendente, you would have love and
sex and music. And you wouldn't need any supernatural permission for any
of this nonsense. I miss it terribly. I feel like something was torn away from me when I was born."
Christopher Hitchens
"Brains are biological and minds are cultural."
A importância do papel das artes na educação e os processos cognitivos que promovem.
"In a certain sense we can think of the curriculum as a mind altering device."
What's So Great About God
"What we risk if we take the supernatural route is the idea of an unchangeable, unalterable authority. One apparently benign, one apparently wicked. Both of them eternal, both of them unchanging and unchangeable, and ourselves as their play things and their objects and their raw material. This is where the idea of tyranny begins. With the eternal unchanging tyrannical authority. Where we must try with our poor power to guess what's wanted of us and to spend our lives on our knees."
Christopher Hitchens
Deus existe?
Um debate muito interessante e muito politicamente correcto, salpicado
com aquele humor inteligente que nos faz sorrir. Apesar da minha
simpatia pender mais para um dos oradores, e achando este tipo de
debates pertinentes e até úteis, não deixo de achar que continuamos a
discutir o sexo dos anjos. Paradoxal? Provavelmente. Gostaria de ter
ouvido alguém a referir a obra de Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Saliento
a questão colocada por CH a WLG: "How many religions in the world do
you believe to be false?", respondida por WLG: "I don't know how many
religions there are."
A
propósito da vida fazer sentido ou ter um sentido, CH afirma: "What is
meaningful to me is trying to be free and trying to help others to be
free too. Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship
and you will have taken the first step
to becoming free." e acrescenta, "one obstacle to liberty is the
poisonous role played by fellow primates of mine who think they can tell
me what to do, in the name of God, because God has told them that they
have this power."
At
the end of the day, a minha opinião é que quando se 'acredita' numa
coisa, é irrelevante provar que ela existe ou não existe. Acreditar tem
pouco a ver com objectividade científica, com raciocínio lógico. É
emocional. É cultural.
"seek
and you will find. If you can't get good evidence you will get junk
evidence [the human pattern seeking brain]". Até porque Deus escreve
direito por linhas tortas.
...
"Tentou falar-me. Falava em abstracto, mas tinha passado a vida a adaptar abstracções aos auditórios para que os auditores não tivessem problemas em adaptar as abstracções dele às particularidades das suas vidas."
Norman Maclean, in Passa lá um rio
